Episode 6

We recently spent a fun weekend in New Hampshire together, where we recorded this episode.
Key points include:
1. Food – Discovering a newfound love of bourbon and Guinness as food flavorings
2. Recreation – Exploring a new type of word game, Wordle, to take a break from work
3. Experience – Enjoying the freedom of working remotely
4. Sponsor – Touchstone Crystal (link)
5. Happiness – Going on a fun ‘Amazing Race’ scavenger hunt at a unique campground in Maine

Connect with Michelle:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sassymichelleg/ 
Websites: FreshMaps.us FreshRebellion.com
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT AND LINKS

[00:00:00] Michelle:

Welcome to Get F.R.E.S.H. with Michelle Girasole, a podcast that gives you fresh ideas for living your best life. Enjoy our conversations that center on the acronym F.R.E.S.H. F is food, R is for recreation, E is for experiences, S is for our sponsors, and every episode closes with an H, a happy story or memory. I hope you enjoy this little break in your day, listening to how others are living F.R.E.S.H. and I’d love to hear your ideas. Reach out through my website, freshrebellion.com.

[00:00:44] Michelle: In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about friendship. Friends are so important in our lives. I remember my first memory of having a friend who was at the play sand table in preschool, and that little friend, Kris, turned out to be my best friend over the next 45 years. And we shared so many things together. I think friends can come and go. Some friends are there for a period of our lives. You think of your classmates or your sports teammates, people you know from the dorm or from your first job out of college. And some stay with you because you have multiple things in common that you just enjoy beyond just that one, that one time.

One of those friends for me is Marita Fairfield. She and I met when she was at the Women’s Business Center in Wiscasset, Maine, and I was a speaker at a conference in New Hampshire and we just hit it off. She invited me to come and do a workshop. We found out that we had kids the same age, and through the years, we just ended up taking road trips to do fun things with the kids and could talk business and made a lasting friendship. So I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of Get F.R.E.S.H. with Marita Fairfield.

[00:01:45] Michelle:  Hey, it’s Michelle Girasole, and I’m here with Marita Fairfield, my guest today on ‘Get F.R.E.S.H. Podcast’. Welcome!

[00:02:12] Marita: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:15] Michelle:  Nice to have you. We’ve known each other for about… we’re thinking about about 15 years.

[00:02:19] Marita: Ten years or so. Yeah.

[00:02:21] Michelle:  We are in New Hampshire at the moment, which is where we met.

[00:02:24] Marita: Yes.

[00:02:25] Michelle:  At a training. We were doing an SEO training for the Regional Small Business Development Centers, and Marita was the only person in the room who understood what we were talking about.

[00:02:40] Marita: And then I invited you to Maine to educate other people.

[00:02:43] Michelle: And then you did webinars in 2008, way before webinars were a thing. And now we’re all on Zoom, and you’re just a pioneer of digital education.

[00:02:57] Marita: Still am.

[00:02:59] Michelle:  Yeah, you’re still doing it. So we are going to have a little conversation about things that you enjoy that are F.R.E.S.H. such as food. So I’m going to ask your favorite food category. You had a discovery this weekend.

[00:03:17] Marita: Yes. So, as you know, I’m pretty picky about drinking. Very fussy. But I discovered that while I hate Bourbon and Guinness as drinks, I love them as food flavorings. Like probably my favorite way of having Bourbon is your maple chocolate pecan pie.

[00:03:17] Michelle: There’s a lot of stuff in that pie.

[00:03:43] Marita: No maple bourbon.

[00:03:43] Michelle: The maple bourbon was the turkey tips.

[00:03:43] Marita: But isn’t there bourbon in the pie?

[00:03:43] Michelle: There’s bourbon in the pie but no maple in the pie.

[00:03:56] Marita: Okay.

[00:03:55] Michelle: Bourbon chocolate pecan pie.

[00:03:55] Marita: Chocolate pecan pie. But there’s bourbon in it.

[00:03:56] Michelle: Yeah, that was a good pie.

[00:03:56] Marita: Oh, my gosh, that was so good.

[00:03:56] Michelle: I almost can’t be friends with you because you can’t drink the bourbon! But I’m going to honor it that you gave the pie a try and you loved it. And I’m going to give a shout out on that pie to the “Bourbon Badass herself, Linda Ruffenach. I pulled out that cookbook and found that pie recipe and I had to make it for this weekend. So, yeah, it was really good.

[00:04:10] Marita: And because of the pie, I had Guinness state tips with you that night.

[00:04:32] Michelle: Yup. We found an Irish pub [apartment rental on] Airbnb, which is very dangerous for an Irish girl. You had some kind of an ale with the steak tips.

[00:04:32] Marita: Yes, I did.

[00:04:48] Michelle: Yup. And I had a Jameson and Ginger.

[00:04:48] Marita: Yes. Some of the other stuff I don’t like to drink.

[00:04:48] Michelle: It was a nice meal. Yeah. [crosstalk]

[00:04:59] Marita: Guinness wasn’t steak. The bourbon was tonight, I loved the bourbon turkeys.

[00:04:59] Michelle: You’re on a kick. I think you’ve got a new theme!

[00:05:07] Marita: [I thought] The bourbon was good in the pie, so it might be good in the turkey. And it was.

[00:05:07] Michelle: So it’s nice and sweet. Yeah, that adds a nice sweet flavor to the meat. So yeah, new food flavoring.

[00:05:21] Marita: Discovery.

[00:05:21] Michelle: Discovery. Very nice.

R-Recreation: Wordle

So in our next segment of our podcast, we talk about something fun, something recreational that you like to do. So you have something that I have just kind of caught on late to, which is typical. You’re a technology advantage. You’re always ahead of me but..

[00:05:35] Marita: I work all the time remotely on my computer and my break in the day is doing Wordle puzzles.

[00:05:47] Michelle: Wordle?

[00:05:48] Marita: Wordle.

[00:05:49] Michelle: It’s such a strange word to say. Wordle.

[00:05:52] Marita: Let me tell you.

[00:05:53] Michelle: Wordle puzzles.

[00:05:54] Marita: All the different puzzles I do before…

[00:05:55] Michelle: Variations on Wordle?

[00:05:57] Marita: There’s a lot.

[00:05:58] Michelle: Okay, go ahead, say what they are.

[00:06:01] Marita:  Wordle, Duordle, that’s two Wordles at once. Querdle which is four Worldes at once. And Octerdle, which is eight Wordles at once.

[00:06:10] Michelle: Octerdle. You have eight Wordle puzzles going at the same time? Yeah, we can’t talk about this anymore. My head hurts…

[00:06:18] Marita: That is recreation to me.

[00:06:20] Michelle: That’s torture. I would drink more bourbon if I had to do Octordle. Octordle is it?

[00:06:18] Marita: Octordle.

[00:06:26] Michelle: So Wordle is fun. My mom was recently playing Wordle on a road trip to Maine, and it’s very challenging to get the letters in the right sequence. And you only have, what, five tries? Six tries?

[00:06:38] Marita: Just one word at a time.

[00:06:38] Michelle: What most sane people do. But you get this consistently. You do it every day and you don’t pull your hair out.

[00:06:52] Marita: No, it’s actually relaxing.

[00:06:52] Michelle: To think about words.

[00:06:56] Marita: Yeah.

[00:06:57] Michelle: I do like wordle. I have not been consistent with it, believe it or not. The guys at the gym were talking about the Wordle one day, and I’m like, “What is this thing?” I heard about it from guys at the gym so I gave it a try. I’m a writer. I consider myself fairly smart about words and it’s challenging. So it’s a little brain teaser.

[00:07:12] Marita: It takes you away from your work.

[00:07:23] Michelle: Yeah. Get your mind off of it. Do you play it in the middle of the day? At night?

[00:07:23] Marita: Most of the time I’m working all day long, and I play it on my lunch break because I can have lunch and look at the screen and not be typing, answering emails. I just give myself that. Every now and then, my Wordle streak is interrupted by work, but I try to give myself that time.

[00:07:39] Michelle: Yes. But you don’t do it on the road?

[00:07:39] Marita: No.

[00:07:39] Michelle: My mom is showing me the screen while I’m driving. I’m like, “Mom, not right now!”

[00:07:53] Marita: I only do it on my computer.

[00:07:53] Michelle: Okay.

[00:07:53] Marita: Not on my phone.

[00:07:53] Michelle: Oh, interesting.

[00:07:53] Marita: And I’m only on my work computer because…

[00:08:00] Michelle: That’s where it is.

[00:08:01] Marita: Where it gives me the mind break.

[00:08:05] Michelle: So your recreation is on your work computer?

[00:08:09] Marita: Yeah.

[00:08:09] Michelle: Okay. I’m going to go with it. We’re going to move on to Experiences. Experiences is kind of a free for all category. What do you want to talk about?

E-Experiences: Working Remotely

[00:08:19] Marita: Because I work remotely, I can work from anywhere, theoretically. But until I became an empty nester, I hadn’t tried putting it into practice, though. This trip is about working from anywhere. We’re in New Hampshire.

[00:08:34] Michelle: So my son and Marita’s daughter are both freshmen in college this year. And in the summer, we were kind of checking in like, “How are you doing?” And now we’re both empty nesters. Marita told me about the phrase ‘spoiling the nest’, which is when your kids who are about to go to college start driving you absolutely insane on purpose so that it’s not as hard for them to leave. That’s how I understood it. “Spoiling the nest.” So we committed back then to doing a fall trip, fall foliage trip. What a beautiful weekend we’ve had up here.

[00:09:08] Marita: Yeah. And we’ve made my kid jealous by sending pictures of where we are.

[00:09:15] Michelle: Yes. The sunsets on the mountains are gorgeous. The leaves on the trees at this time of year.

[00:09:23] Marita: Yeah, it’s good.

[00:09:24] Michelle: Yeah. Because you can work from anywhere. You designed it that way. But you don’t always do that. I’m doing a lot of that. It’s been enjoyable, so yeah, very cool.

S-Sponsorship: Touchstone Crystal

So we will break for our sponsorship moment. This podcast is sponsored by a very sparkly sponsor, which is Touchstone Crystal. Touchstone Crystal is my new favorite thing. I have all their sparkly earrings, necklaces, bracelets,, wristlets. It’s Swarovski crystal and they sparkle like diamonds, and they don’t cost you what diamonds cost you. So I really, really enjoy the product line.

And I am happy to connect you with Joanne Forti, who is my Touchstone Crystal consultant extraordinaire. And she knows everything and has every product, I think, in the catalogue. And she’s just a phenomenal resource for people who want to do the business or learn a little bit more about how Touchstone Crystal could be a really great gift. So thank you, Touchstone, for adding some great happy sparkle to the day.

And that brings us to the last category of our podcast, which is happiness. Happy memories.

H – Happiness: Time with Friends

[00:10:45] Marita: Spending time with friends like you.

[00:10:48] Michelle: Ah, very cute. Very sweet.

[00:10:51] Marita: And we’ve had some really good times in the past together.

[00:10:53] Michelle: Yeah, it’s nice to have someone who you can relax and talk about, work with, because sometimes your friends that from town or even your family sometimes doesn’t really get it like we’re in the same field, so that’s really nice. Really nice. And we had a really fun time one trip two summers ago. No, [overlapping].

[00:11:15] Marita: Three summers ago.

[00:10:16] Michelle: Three summers ago.

[00:11:17] Marita: Yeah.

[00:11:18] Michelle: The Amazing Race… have I talked about that on our podcast? I’m not sure that I have. Bar Harbor, Maine, the third weekend in August, you rent a camp space or one of their cabins at Hadley Point Campground, which has been in my family for 50 years. And they organized – my cousins Lauren and Allison – organized a scavenger hunt around Mount Desert Island, Bar Harbor downtown, Ellsworth. They took us all over the place.

[00:11:53] Marita: We had my teenager there, and she even got in.

[00:11:56] Michelle: We did drag her kicking into a couple of the challenges. But they give you a packet of clues and you have to go and find the things. And some of them were easy. I don’t think many of them were easy, but like, going to the LL Bean store and finding five things and taking a picture, that was fun. But there was one that was like a word scramble and you’re a Wordle queen. But we were scratching our heads. We stopped at the ice cream store to see if the locals could help us we could not figure out. And it turned out to be like something island soap.

[00:12:34] Marita: Yeah, the soap place!

[00:12:37] Michelle: The soap place, which had the cutest little bars and soap. When we finally found it, it was like, “Oh, my God, now it makes sense.” But, yeah, that was a challenge. But yeah, then everybody goes back to.the…

[00:12:48] Marita: …the campfire at the end.

[00:12:51] Michelle: Yeah, there’s a big field and a campfire, and everybody goes back and shares their stories and there’s prizes. They do a really good job.

[00:12:58] Marita: We didn’t get a prize.

[00:13:00] Michelle: No, we didn’t get as many points as some others. I remember, I think, we took pictures, the final one was in a fountain and we jumped in the fountain. We were so happy we finally finished. It took us a full day and a half to do the challenges. So really fun. I love scavenger hunts, and they do a really good job with The Amazing Race, so that is a happy memory.

[00:13:21] Marita: Yeah.

[00:13:22] Michelle: Any final happy thoughts?

[00:13:25] Marita: Thank you for being here.

[00:13:26] Michelle: Thank you for being on my podcast.

[00:13:27] Marita: Yeah.

[00:13:33] Michelle: So that’s it. I hope you enjoyed the Get F.R.E.S.H. podcast. If you liked it, you can find us on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you’d get your podcasts and please find us online at freshrebellion.com.  You can get our links to social media there. Join our Facebook group, Fresh from Rhode Island, and find me on Instagram, @SassyMichelleG and Twitter, @SassyMichelle. 

[00:13:51] Michelle: Bye for now.